


Backup Hunter

by DwarvenBeardSpores



Category: Supernatural
Genre: AU, Cannibalism, Case Fic, Drug Use, Episode: s04e17 It's a Terrible Life, Episode: s05e04 The End, Ghouls, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-16
Updated: 2015-11-16
Packaged: 2018-05-01 21:08:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,449
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5220899
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DwarvenBeardSpores/pseuds/DwarvenBeardSpores
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean Smith and Sam Wesson hunt ghosts. Sometimes they do it together, but sometimes Sam is out of town and they hunt separately, and sometimes Dean brings his stoner boyfriend Castiel along as backup. </p><p>And sometimes what they're hunting isn't actually a ghost.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Backup Hunter

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Halloween Destiel Ficlet Challenge on tumblr.
> 
> (Warnings for graveyards and random dead people, sort-of cannibalism, drug use, and canon-typical violence)

Castiel is not much good on hunts. Dean always says that it would help if he was completely sober before they went out, or at least a little bit sober, but Cas doesn't agree. He'd just be in-pain and miserable, and honestly, they're pushing the limits of reality looking for ghosts, so Cas doesn't think doing it without weed would make it any easier. 

"You can call me Norville," he says when Dean complains. 

Dean doesn't look away from the road, but Cas can see his hands tighten around the steering wheel. "Norville?"

"Yeah." 

"Why Norville?"

"Hmmm?" Cas likes it when the weed does things to Dean's freckles, makes them roam around his face. It's cute. 

"Cas."

"Oh. Shaggy. From Scooby-Doo. That's his name." Cas sometimes forgets that Dean can't see Cas's train of thought the way Cas can. 

"Why would I-"

"He hunts ghosts. And he's high. You could be Fred. You'd make a good Fred."

Dean makes a noise like he's not quite sure what to make of that. Cas rests his head against the back of his seat and watches the ceiling of the car as it changes color with the setting sun. He knows Dean worries. Cas worries too. Cas just has more effective ways of dealing with it. He gets high. Dean just makes spreadsheets.

"I just don't think you're in any state to be killing anything," Dean says.

Cas smiles, wide and loose.

After a few minutes of silence, Dean pulls off down a dirt road. He checks his GPS several times to make sure he's in the right spot, since it doesn't exactly look safe.

"That's kind of the point," Cas points out. 

"Yeah, well, you know. It's always good to make sure."

But the GPS seems very sure of itself, and very soon they end up at a graveyard. It’s not the best-kept graveyard Cas has ever seen, but it’s not in total disrepair. Weathered gravestones push their way like molars through tufts of grass that have only gone a week or so without being weed-wacked. The front gate trembles in the October wind like it’s trying to take flight. 

Cas can sympathize. 

Dean doesn’t care much for the gate, though. He’s reaching under his seat and pulling out his Hunting Case, grabbing a gun-store gun, flashlights, a box of matches and a bottle of kerosene. “Grab the pokers,” he says to Cas, who looks over to where the fire-stoking tools are sitting across the backseat. They look heavy and unstable, like they’d melt right through Cas’s hands as soon as he picked them up, drip iron into the car seat. 

By the time he realizes this, Dean is already out of the car, grabbing a bag of salt from the truck. 

“Cas, c’mon!” he shouts, a familiar tremor in his voice. 

Dean wishes Sam were here instead of Cas. Sam knows all about killing dead things, and he’s reliable. Cas is supposed to be “backup” until Sam can get here from three physical and two mental states away, but he brings more curiosity than experience, and more of an attachment to Dean than any sense of moral obligation. 

But he can get the pokers. He does. 

“What’s our objective, Captain?” he asks, grinning slightly. “Ghosts?”

Dean licks his lips. “Right,” he says. He seems to be nervous enough that he doesn’t mind going over information again, for good measure. “There’ve been sightings of dead people- of ghosts- in town, a lot of them all of a sudden. We tracked them to this graveyard, which happens to coincide with a couple of grave robberies.” 

“Oh,” Cas says. “And what are we doing about it?”

“Sam and I think, uh, we think there might be more ghost hunters.” Dean says. “If ghosts have been showing up, for some reason, and then someone’s been burning the bodies to get rid of them, it seems like it’s gotta be someone else doing the same job, right?”

“Mmmhmmm.”

“And you know what’s hard in this business?” Dean asks. He slams the trunk and turns to clasp Cas’s shoulder. “Networking.”

Cas nods.

Dean nods too, and swallows, and turns to head into the graveyard. “Gotta make connections, Cas. It’s how you survive in this world.”

The upset graves are all the way in the back of the cemetery. Dean keeps an eye out for anything moving, Cas keeps an eye out for anything that might hurt Dean. It’s irrational, Cas’s desire to protect this businessman, but as long as he’s around he might as well indulge it. Dean is the one who provides an apartment for him to crash in most nights, anyway, ever since he realized that he can hunt, but he can’t be on the road all the time. “Need a home base,” Dean had said, and if he had purposely chosen it within a few miles of where Cas was squatting, neither of them mentioned it. 

Sometimes, Cas thinks, a pair of ghost hunters finding him shooting up in an abandoned house might’ve been the best thing that’d ever happened to him.

“There,” Dean says, pointing at a patch of dirt that has very clearly been defiled. He approaches it cautiously, flashlight wavering on the stone. 

“There’s no one there,” Cas says. “It’s too quiet.”

“Shhhh.”

Castiel rolls his eyes and zips his lips.

They approach the hole in the ground, and Dean peers in, waving his flashlight around and trying to stay as far away as possible. He blinks, wavers, then leans closer. “What the-“

“Hasn’t she been burned?” Cas asks. He’s alternately watching Dean and investigating the tombstone of one Sarah F. Scheuller, 1934-1973.

“Doesn’t look like it,” Dean says, and his squeamish grave-face is disappearing into one of confusion. “There’s not- there’s no body here.”

Cas crouches down by the edge of the grave and peers in. There’s a splintered mess of coffin, and the smell of decay, but no body. 

“No ashes either,” Dean is saying. “No body no ashes. Where did it go?”

Castiel shrugs. “Maybe she climbed out.”

“Don’t be-“ Dean’s face contorts as he realizes that is, in fact, a possibility. 

“Maybe she was never there to begin with,” Cas tries. 

“Okay, Cas? Text Sam for me? I’m gonna see…” Dean pulls out his phone and starts scrolling through the internet, probably checking his favorite ghost-hunting websites in case they have anything to say about empty graves. 

Cas pulls out his own phone and composes a text to Sam. [No body no ashes :( ] There.

As Dean continues muttering at his phone, Cas looks around the graveyard. There’s another disrupted grave a little farther down the line. It would be nice, Cas thinks, if he could help Dean figure this out. He picks up one of the pokers and starts wandering in that direction, acutely conscious of all the decomposing people he’s indirectly treading on. 

Dean accidentally starts a ghostfacers video, and Cas can hear him shouting “shit- shit” as he tries to turn the volume down. He smiles.

The sun is already out of sight, and the sky is getting very dark, and Cas is acutely aware of this, too. He finds himself a the edge of the grave and crouches down, shining a flashlight into the depths. This one is just like the other one. An empty coffin of wooden teeth, no smell of smoke that isn’t coming from Cas himself. 

Huh. 

He crosses his legs and sits next to the pit that used to hold one James Phillip Simon Smith, 1960-2004. If ghosts are real, and if this one’s body has been taken away, Cas wonders if he could hear something from the spirit, that might help. He folds his hands in his lap and closes his eyes, listening. 

He hears the wind, cold, biting through his sweatshirt. He hears a goose in the distance, complaining, about something that is ultimately not dead bodies. He hears his own heartbeat, his breaths, slipping between his lips. He hears the quiet murmurings of the spirits who are at rest, telling each other stories in between minutes. He hears panic, displacement, someone drawn to this grave. He grins, and reaches out his mind to listen closer. 

And then there are hands on his shoulders, shaking him, snapping his connection, and a voice, Dean’s voice, shouting “Cas- Cas!” 

“What?” Cas demands, as soon as he can speak again. He scowls as soon as he can open his eyes. 

“What the hell- you disappeared and I thought- what are you doing?!?”

“I was listening for James.”

“Cas, we’re in a graveyard, we’re in a horror movie. You don’t go wandering off, okay?!” Dean is angry, he’s really angry, and he’s shaking just a bit. He hasn’t let go of Cas’s shoulders yet. 

“Movies are contrivances,” Cas says. “They’re designed to entertain, not inform, certainly not prophesies-“

“I don’t care.” 

Castiel sighs. 

“Cas, whatever we’re dealing with here, it’s not another hunter, and it doesn’t look like any ghost anyone’s ever heard of. I don’t know what it is but there’s something, so don’t wander off!”

“I had a poker.”

“Cas- please.”

Cas looks down at his hands. “Okay.”

Dean sighs. “We don’t even know if iron’ll do any good against this thing…. what did Sam say?”

Oh. Right. Sam. Cas had forgotten he’d texted. He pulls his phone out of his pocket and checks his messages, squinting in the bright light. “Uhhh…”

[What?]

[There’s no body- are you talking about in the grave?]

[Are there hunters?]

[What’s going on?]

[Is Dean there?]

[Have him call me]

“You’re not the only one who worries,” Cas says, and hands Dean the phone. 

“Jesus.” Dean scrolls through all the messages and then hits call. Cas stares back down into the grave as Dean stands up to talk.

“Hey Sam? No, no we’re okay. No, it was just Cas being Cas. We’re fine. It’s the weirdest thing…”

Cas lies down on the grass and stares at the stars. He wants more weed. He wants to be a star. He wants to talk to James and Sarah and ask them what happened. He wants sex. He wants a cheeseburger.

“You need to stop pretending ghost hunting makes you sick,” he tells Dean, but Dean isn’t listening. “We should get food after this. You should eat.” Bend the rules or give up on whatever diet he’s on now.

Dean says “Okay, yeah. Call me back. My phone’s on silent, it’ll be fine.” He’s not going to take them out for food after this. He’s going to go home and put on his eyemask and tell Cas he needs his eight hours, and maybe he’ll go into The Office halfway through the next day, and maybe he’ll spend all day of the phone with Sam, and there’s a slim, slim change that Cas will convince him to watch Project Runway all afternoon,

Cas rolls over and presses his face into the grass. 

“Hey. Hey Cas.”

“Are you done?”

“Yeah. Sam thinks it’s weird too. He’s gonna stay where he is and see if he can find anything online, I’m gonna look around a little more here.”

“What about me?”

“Looking around. With me.”

“Okay, captain.” Cas sits up.

“We’re gonna see if there are any more graves, any more clues. We’re gonna report back to Sam and book it, just in case the whatever-it-is comes back.”

“Do you need to hold my hand?” Cas asks dryly. 

Dean sighs. “Just stay close.”

Cas tries not to be disappointed. 

They find two more empty graves. Dean says that matches up with the number of dead people that had been seen in town in the last few months, and he matches their names up too. They can tell from the dirt around the graves which have been dug most recently- the one belonging to James still looks fresh, the one belonging to Christopher Anthony has already been partially filled in by erosion. They seem to be in out-of-the-way corners, as though whoever was digging them up was trying not to be noticed.

They don’t find anything else significant. 

“I guess that’s it,” Dean says. He looks tired and glum, and Cas is glad they’re going home. Dean needs to be tucked into bed. Dean never spends enough time tucked into bed. “We’ll come back when Sam gets here.”

Cas has a feeling he won’t be invited along.

They’re nearly halfway out of the graveyard when Cas stops. A few steps later, Dean stops too, and turns back. “What?”

“Shhh.” 

Dean closes his mouth and they listen. They hear wind, cold, numbing their fingers. They hear bored crickets, and the murmuring of spirits telling stories. They hear their hearts stop when the other sound starts up again. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. 

Dean points to the left and Cas nods. 

Scrape. Scrape. 

Cas lifts his poker and holds his flashlight at the ready. Dean swallows and readies his gun. 

Scrape.

They walk forward, feet light, or trying to be light. Dean kicks a tombstone in the dark, Cas’s feet scuff through leaves. 

Scrape. 

Suddenly there’s a loud cheerful “Hey!” from in front of them. 

Dean jumps. Cas flicks his flashlight on. There’s a man of about forty looking over the side of a grave. He holds up his hand against the light, and Cas catches the glint of jewelry on his fingers. “Woah, warn a guy!”

“What’re you doing here?” Dean says. He points the gun in his direction. 

“Same thing as you,” the man says. “Can you turn that off?” Cas doesn’t. 

Dean lets out a breath. “You’re hunting ghosts?” he says, and there’s a note of hope in his voice, a hint of desperation.

The man laughs. “What a coincidence!”

Dean swallows. Cas can tell he wants it to be true. “Yeah? So what’re you after tonight?”

“Didn’t you hear?” the man says. “This young fellow’s been sighted walking around town. I’m just trying to take care of it.”

Dean flashes Cas a look, but Cas doesn’t know what to say. 

“Yeah, I’ve heard there’ve been a lot of people like that,” Dean says. 

“Have you been putting all of them to rest too?” Cas asks.

The man smiles. “Of course I have. Every one. You’ll see, that’s why there are so many open graves.”

“What’re you doing with them?” Dean asks. He steps a little closer. Cas changes the brightness on his flashlight to high in the hopes that the man won’t see how pale Dean is. 

“Taking care of the bodies.”

“How?” 

“You know. The normal way.”

“No,” Cas says. “Nothing’s been burned. Nothing’s been salted. What have you been doing?”

The man’s eyes flick between them. Then he laughs. “Oh- you’re using the salt and burn method, okay. Yeah. That’s something totally different.”

“What do you use?” Dean demands. 

“Oh, well, it’s a little complicated, but so much more effective. Help me out of here, will you, and we can talk.”

Dean doesn’t step forward. “Look, man, I’m really sorry, but you’ve gotta understand, we want to be safe about this.”

The man’s smile falters. “Of course,” he says. “Give me just a minute- I’m sure you’ve noticed- it’s getting out that’s the hard part…”

He ducks down into the hole for a minute, there’s a crunching noise, and then he’s scrambling over the top. Dean looks almost ashamed, shifting from foot to foot; Cas can’t help but wonder if he’s had trouble getting out of graves before. He’ll have to ask Sam. 

Once the man is on the grass next to them, he holds out his hand for Dean to shake. Dean hesitates, then moves the gun to his left hand and shakes. 

“Call me Jim,” the man says. “And I am sorry about the timing. You’ve caught me at a bit of an awkward moment.”

“Yeah, well. We understand,” Dean says, and subtly wipes his hand on his pants. “Dean,” he adds, by way of introduction. 

They proceed to make small talk about hunting. Cas stands a few feet away, still shining the light in Jim’s face. He’d thought his high had mostly worn off by now, but maybe that was just in the dark. In the light, Jim’s colors and shapes are doing weird things, his shoulders are broadening, his hair is lightening. It’s slow, and it takes a minute for Cas to realize that the change is more or less going consistently in one direction. 

And then he realizes that the man actually is changing shape, probably, unless Cas is way more messed up than he’d thought. The man is changing into something else and he’s standing there talking to Dean like nothing is wrong. 

“Um,” Cas says. “There might be a problem.”

Jim doesn’t give him a second thought, but Dean glances over. “Yeah?”

“Sam called,” Cas says. “He wants to talk to you.” There is no one on his phone, but he offers it to Dean anyway. 

“Yeah, I gotta take this,” Dean says. He steps away from Jim and grabs Cas by the arm, walking them several feet away. “I don’t think he checks out,” Dean says. “I don’t know what it is, but…”

“He’s not holding his shape,” Cas says.  
 “Something like that.”

“No, he’s literally not stable.” Dean frowns, and Cas knows what he’s thinking. “I know I’m not the most reliable, but look. Dean, look at him.” 

Dean turns, but he’s not actually looking. “Sam didn’t call, did he?”

“No. Maybe you should call him.”

“Yeah. Yeah, probably.” Dean bites his lip. “I think he’s wider.”

“Yes,” Cas says, and he doesn’t have time to elaborate because Jim is turning to them, and no, he’s not the same person. 

“Hey,” Dean says, and Cas can see him trying out his Professional Workplace Demeanor. “You okay, man?”

“Like I said,” Jim says. “Awkward timing. You got me just in the middle of lunch.” He grins again, and there’s something not quite right about his face. Dean raises his gun. 

And Jim moves. 

He’s fast, impossibly fast. One minute he’s standing across from them, the next he’s pushing against Cas’s shoulder, throwing him off balance, and he’s falling down, down, into the grave. Dean’s gun goes off and Cas isn’t sure where the bullet goes but its not into its target.

He lands on the coffin and can feel a sharp pain as his wrist twists underneath him. Dean is shouting for him. He can’t shout back. There is a whoosh of movement, and Dean curses, and then things are quiet. 

Cas’s breath comes back all at once. “Dean!”

“I’m here,” Dean says. He’s panting, and a second later crawls to the edge of the grave. He’s bleeding from a gash on his face and another on his arm. “Cas, you okay?”

“I-“ Cas turns to assess the damage. He’s scratched up, his wrist is definitely sprained. And he’s sitting on… half a corpse. 

“Dean…” he frowns at decaying flesh torn away from someone’s ribcage with a kind of detached fascination. “I think he was eating them.”

“He was- Oh my God.” Dean turns away and throws up. Cas waits patiently and feels a little bad for doubting how viscerally Dean could be affected by all this. 

It’s quite a chore getting Cas out of the grave, but they manage, nervous the whole time that whatever-it-was is coming back. “I’ll shoot it in the head,” Dean says, and nods. “I didn’t want to before, but if it comes back…”

“I’ve heard your instincts are usually right,” Cas says. “Ow.”

Dean drives them back to the side of the main road before pulling over to patch them up properly. He wraps Cas’s hand first, then Cas cleans the cuts on his face and arms while Dean calls Sam. 

“Sam says ghoul,” Dean reports back. “They take the shape of whoever they… uh…”

“Ate?”

“Yeah.”

Cas nods. That would explain it. “Are we going to go back?”

“Apparently they mostly just eat dead people. Unless this one gets a taste for fresh meat…” Dean looks a little queasy at that, but swallows it down, “Unless that happens, we’re not too much of a hurry…”

That sounds reasonable. “We’re waiting for Sam?” he asks. 

“Yeah.” Dean starts the car.

They drive in silence until they get to Dean’s apartment. Then Dean turns to Cas. “You did good out there.”

“I didn’t-“

Dean pulls him close and kisses him on the forehead. “Let’s go to bed, Shaggy.”

“Stay home tomorrow.”

Dean smiles. “I will.” He shoves the gun in his waistband, but leaves the rest of the gear in the car. 

He grabs Cas’s good hand and holds it as they walk inside.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! 
> 
> You can also find me on tumblr as dwarven-beard-spores.


End file.
